The sight of the woman in navy uniform drained Beth of all color. She forgot to invite her in — heard Jeannie’s “Can I come out now?” and the woman saying something about “normally the Pentagon… but in light of the news reports… as soon as they have further information…” Beth finally rallied enough to ask the woman in, but she said no, asking whether there was anything else she could do.
“Mom, can I come out!” Beth’s hand was on her forehead, trying to sort it all out. She asked the Wave whether Ray’s parents had been notified.
“No, ma’am. Our policy is to first notify…”
“When will you know for sure?”
“Mom, CAN I COME OUT!!”
“Be quiet, Jeannie! Sorry—”
“We should know something more in a few hours, Mrs. Brentwood. I’ll be sure to call you.”
When Beth walked back from the door, Johnny saw something was wrong.
“That lady an officer, Mom?” he asked timidly.
“Yes.” Beth was stirring the fiercely boiling water, macaroni packet unopened.
“She talking ‘bout Daddy?”
“What?” Beth looked down at Johnny. He was holding the macaroni packet. “Can I open it, Mom? I’m strong.”
“Sure,” she said. Johnny’s cherubic face grinned, then turned red as he tried valiantly to puncture the push-open tab. “I help you when Daddy’s away, Mom.”
Beth bent down and hugged him. “Jeannie,” she said, “you can come out now.”
Jeannie came out pouting but not daring a repeat offense so soon.
“Come over here, honey,” said Beth, her voice soft, unhurried. When she pulled Jeannie to her, the three of them clung in an embrace, and it struck her how small a physical space a family actually occupied, a feeling of being infinitessimally small.
Of the Blaine’s 192-man crew, only 61 were rescued, 11 of these dying within the first two hours of pickup and 14 still in shock with third-degree burns, including Ray Brentwood, whose face was so badly disfigured that the Des Moines’s sick bay petty officer, after giving Brentwood a shot of morphine, had left him till last, assuming he was a goner, the time better spent on some of the others.
The burn victims, the worst of whom were Brentwood and the lookout who’d been on the port side when the second missile slammed into the port side railing, were ferried to the Salt Lake City. Ray Brentwood’s nose was nothing more than a skewed lump of flesh, a molten pulp now cooled, so that he was forced to breathe through his mouth, creating an alternately groaning and dry whisking sound, which, for all the compassion they had in the sick bay, several of the attendants found difficult to tolerate and so sent someone else to do the awful job of dabbing cool saline solution to wash away the globs of congealed blood from raw flesh that had once been the patient’s face. Brentwood’s eyes, having been partially protected by sunglasses but more effectively by the instinctive closing of the eyelids during the flash of the explosion, seemed not to be affected, but if he survived, this would have to be confirmed by later and more detailed tests once they got to Tokyo.
Now and then he tried to say something, but no one could understand what it was and put the garbled and repulsively snorting sounds down to pain- and narcotic-induced delirium.
In the Tokyo U.S. Army hospital, beneath the junglelike oppressiveness of an oxygen tent, Brentwood felt a searing burn, so intense he kept blacking out beneath the onslaught of pain, the merest eddy of air tearing across his raw flesh like a white-hot rake. What the voice inside was trying to ask was, what had become of his men and of his ship? But no answers came — only enormous and elusive shadows bending over the tent, the roar of his own breath like that of a doomed animal, the rushing of what he thought was his own blood unbearable but which was in fact his urine, something wrong with the catheter, filling the bed, the warm, acidic solution burning his already burned legs, his sense of smell gone. He was screaming.
With all the will he could muster, Ray Brentwood prayed for death, and now the jungle of vines, IV tubes swinging about him, went completely black, shrinking to a distant point of light, then a gentle blue, the color of the Exocet’s exhaust growing larger until it began to fade, flickering away, replaced by a long, intensely white tunnel and within him a sense of rising above the earth, his screams unheard.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
The meeting requested by the U.S. ambassador in Beijing had begun at 10:00 a.m. precisely, being late for an appointment being considered a grave insult to the Chinese. The white lace antimacassars draped over the arms and headrests of the old-fashioned maroon velvet lounge chair struck the American ambassador as typically Chinese, at once quaint and sensible, like the covered teacups on the table between him and the Mao-suited chairman of the Chinese Communist Party. The ambassador noticed that there was a new spittoon, this one a lighter gray than the last, which sat at the chairman’s feet, looking for all the world like a child’s potty. The lounge chair was so comfortable, it made it difficult for the American ambassador, for anyone, to make a strong point, for in order to drive home the argument, most people found it necessary to first do battle with the chair that enfolded them, yet sitting on the very edge of the chair gave one the undignified attitude of an eager schoolboy in front of the chairman, a position contrary to the dignified pose striven for by the representative of one of the two most powerful nations on earth. President Mayne’s instructions had been clear: to assure the Chinese that the presence of the American carrier Salt Lake City in the Sea of Japan was not meant in any way as a threat to the People’s Republic but was there merely to assist American action in South Korea — as it was permitted to do under the terms of the UN Charter, of which the People’s Republic was a member.
The Chinese chairman was smoking as he spoke to the interpreter, a thin, young man in rimless glasses who, even as he was receiving his instructions, was looking at the American.
“The chairman understands, Mr. Ambassador, but there must be no interference north of the thirty-eighth parallel. On this matter we are resolved.”
The American ambassador acknowledged the point but did remind the chairman that it was not South Korea that had “initiated engagement” and that the U.S. government might find it necessary to operate above the thirty-eighth parallel if it involved securing the safety of South Korean and/or United States citizens.
“The chairman disputes your claim insofar as it was clearly the repeated provocations and aggression of the Seoul government which precipitated hostilities. As a good neighbor of the Democratic Republic of Korea, the People’s Republic of China may have no alternative but to aid the Koreans in freeing their country of hostile and antidemocratic elements.”
“But not in the South?” asked the ambassador. The chairman began the long warm-up preparatory to spitting, sounding as if he were in the grip of a severe case of catarrh. The chairman spat at the spittoon, the ambassador’s eyes scrupulously avoiding witness of the act by watching the interpreter, who was busy informing him at the chairman’s request that the Chinese People’s Republic did not recognize such designations as “North” or “South” Korea, that there was only one country and this was the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. The Seoul “gangsters” were merely usurpers, in Beijing’s view. The Chinese People’s Republic had no quarrel with the United States and wished friendly relations with Washington, but the chairman, on behalf of the Politburo, would reserve China’s historical right to intervene should the integrity of the People’s Republic be threatened. Which meant that, as in 1950, Beijing would not tolerate any American action north of the Yalu along the Manchurian-Soviet-North Korean border.